Category: Discussion

Around age 6, I made my first steps with a computer: drawing houses in MacPaint and typing elaborately formatted 30-line novellas in MacWrite. A couple years later, building my first programs using HyperCard (at the time I thought of it as “playing some sort of virtual lego game” rather than “writing object-oriented programs”).

Although I long ago decided that I did not want to make a career out of merely writing computer code, the skills I seamlessly acquired back then have since opened countless doors and helped me etch a living at times where options were scarce.

I would have most likely picked these skills anyway, had my dad not brought back a brand new Mac 512k to his practice, one day in 1986… But learning them the way I did unquestionably shaped my entire vision of the modern world: it taught me that technology does not have to look complicated to do complex things, that building things can be exciting and fun…

Apple Inc. is just a company, staffed with many great people at the moment, but still just a company: with no personality or sense of human emotions.

Steve Jobs, on the other hand, like him or not, shaped the world we live in. His ambition, his drive and the people he chose to carry his vision out, will keep resonating in the technologies your life is built around, for many more decades to come.

Head of City Planning: How are the plans going for my diabolical lair of doom and despair? [strokes evil overlord‘s pointy beard and burst out with maniacal laughter]

Chief Architect: About that. I got your specs and there are a few details we need to go over…

HoCP:[cocks eyebrow mid-maniacal-laughter] ?

CA: Page 6, paragraph 13. When you write “The Tower of Doom shall be standing at the top of a massive dark volcano spitting rivers of glowing lava amidst bursts of thunder and the howling of a thousand souls bound for eternal damnation”… I don’t think we have the budget for that.

HoCP: What? But that was a fundamental part of the design!

CA: Sorry.

HoCP: What about the flock of fire-breathing dragons, then?

CA: I doubt Animal Control will go for that.

HoCP: The moat? At least give me the moat and giant man-eating crocodiles!

CA: We looked into that and it just doesn’t sound practical.

HoCP: But how are people to guess this is a train-station water cistern, if it doesn’t carry an adequate sense of doom and heavy foreboding?

CA: Well, there are a few things we can do…

HoCP: listening…

CA: We could make the tower really ominous and lugubrious, like something out of a Tolkien novel. Make it entirely black. But not some sleek shiny black: we go for suffocating, light-absorbing, black-as-coal black. Something that would look great against our typical backdrop of sunless gray skies…

HoCP: Keep going, I like what I’m hearing…

CA: Shape-wise, I was thinking we’d go for a martial theme: dangerous and uninviting, military without the reassuring overtones… a pointy prussian helmet, maybe?

HoCP: That sounds awesome! And so appropriate for a building that will define the landscape of the neighbourhood. When can you start?

While discussing the finer points of Berlin’s traumatic history and the intriguing question of how the wall partition may have been extended across the Spree river (and what would have prevented people from simply swimming their way West):

Calmly hypothesise:

… by restricting access to the river, through additional barricades and watch-towers…

Do not shout:

Sharks mit fucking Laserstrahlen!!!

When the workshop organiser congratulates you on receiving First Prize for “Best Workshop Poster” and casually suggests that you treat yourself to a nice evening out with the prize money:

Do say:

I could not possibly take sole credit for this recognition of what was a collective research effort. I shall be taking my colleagues out to the finest restaurant this town has to offer!

Do not say:

Actually… I had to promise 20 euros per vote. I am still largely out of pocket on that one.

Yes, indeed. Who could forget the fine contributions of German culture to Japan’s enlightened Meiji era and its constitutional reform. Not to mention Mori Ōgai’s influential translations of Germany’s greatest poets…

Do not say:

About fucking time we gave it another go. Nobody will see it coming!

Let’s just leave Italy out this time, though.

Germany’s similarity to Japan in its lack of appreciation for deadpan, combined with a much lower linguistic threshold, could prove quite lethal to my complete absence of self-censorship in a social setting…

There must be a way to convey to a Japanese audience why Amélie was adequate but ultimately forgettable in its schlocky quirkiness and Paris (“the movie”): a derivative piece of tourism porn by an aging director, who used to do much better… that does not make one sound like a bitter jaded fuck or a strident Parisian film snob.